


The End Of Things

by Krasimer



Series: Do Not Go Gentle [23]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, F/F, Happy Ending, Humanstuck, after the game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-16 00:28:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14152707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krasimer/pseuds/Krasimer
Summary: Your name was Feferi Peixes.





	The End Of Things

Your name is Felicity Maxwell.

You are twenty-six when you first remember a world that seems impossible. People with gray skin and wild eyes and horns sticking out of their heads. You remember a monster in the water that you had just about given up your life to make sure was happy. No good would ever come of letting Gl'bgolyb run free and unseen to – The world would have ended.

You’d had enough problems as it was.

Between a moirail that had gone practically insane in his hatred and the weight of an empire on your back, you had been miserable. Gl'bgolyb being allowed to have free reign would have solved the immediate problem, but you had never wanted the deaths of everyone on your hands. You had never wanted the deaths of _anyone_ on your hands.

And at one point, you would have had to fight the woman who became your mother.

You would have had to kill her to ensure your own survival.

The information comes almost as no surprise – Your mother is a fierce and sometimes vicious woman. Sometimes, when she looks at you, you feel no bigger than a plankton under her gaze.

(It would be another three years before you found out that Gl'bgolyb and Her Imperial Condescension had been combined, along with Her Eternal Compassion. When you find that out, the terror of your teachers when you were a child will make more sense than you had thought possible – They had been afraid of angering your mother, of waking the sleeping nightmares within.)

Your name is Felicity Maxwell and you were once Feferi Peixes.

 

Your name is Felicity Maxwell and you are twenty-seven when you find out that your sister knows of the same world you do.

 

Your name is Felicity Maxwell and you are twenty-seven the year the mother of your sister’s girlfriend is returned to civilian and average life.

Freed from the captivity of a ruthless and cruel man – You wonder, sometimes, how she survived it all. There is certainly an untamed will within her, a nearly desperate wanting to survive and see it all through. You have to wonder if that is why she is still alive to be reunited with her daughters.

Her name, as it was before he took her and kept her captive, is all but forgotten.

He stripped her of her identity, stripped away everything that would have marked her as her own person. Lord English, the nightmare you and your friends had been facing down, has always been and apparently will always be, a disgusting mess of a creature. You don’t even want to give him the dignity of being called a person.

The very idea of him makes your stomach clench and your heart pound in your chest.

Melanie feels the same, you find out. She wants nothing more than to slide a knife into the soft parts of his body and wrench it sideways until his blood spills out and there is nothing left of him. Her way is perhaps a little more violent than what you would choose, but you cannot help but agree with the sentiment. English deserves death, for everything he has done.

In the game and outside of it.

Every version of outside of it. Even the lives you live now, the ones that put everyone in a neutral existence where no one is nearly as murderous as a troll. You had loved your people, had loved the society less than the actual people, but every inch of it had been horrifying in some way. As a troll, you could not put a name to the way it scared you, but now you can.

Trolls were made for death and destruction.

Whoever had created them in the first place, however your species came to be, they were almost designed for murder.

A shiver runs down your spine as you think about it.

At least now, with the changes made and humanity being an interesting new barrier between the learned habits of trolls and your friends, you can see happiness on the horizon. Eridan has found Sollux, which makes you giggle until you nearly choke.

(They always had veered closer and closer to black-rom, as trolls. Now, the four quadrants combined into one sort of thing, they are the most suited-for-each-other couple you can think of besides Tavros and Gamzee. They will always have fights, of course, but they will also be the best possible thing for each other.)

English is a fight for another day, but with the entire group of you aligned together and ready to fight him, you can see an end for him that is not an end for the rest of you. Your sister and her girlfriend threaten him with nearly every breath they take, your mother goes to work with him and comes home talking about how he acts.

She tells you about how his eyes linger on her, how he seems to both want her and want her dead.

English sickens you, no matter what version of him.

 

You are twenty-seven, still, when you finally find Aradia again.

Her hair is a mass of curls around her face and her eyes are very nearly a red color with how brown they are. Everything about her is a balance of delicate and strong and you are, it seems, fated to love her as both a troll and a human and everything in between.

You do have to wonder, sometimes, if the draw Her Imperial Condescension felt to the Handmaid has echoed down through the bloodline.

(Damara and Meenah, Feferi and Aradia. You are, after all, your mother’s children, even when you aren’t.)

She is twenty-one and she Sollux’s caretaker at times. She checks on him twice a week or so, makes certain that none of his lights are burned out. It won’t make a difference to him, whether the lighting is working or not, but it would make a difference if an electrical outlet was burned out and in turn burned the building down around him. She makes sure he has working appliances and food and someone to talk to.

Because Sollux, no matter what name and face and age and species, should not be alone.

It was something you had always noticed about him. Leave him alone too long and he’ll go mad, whether from boredom and loneliness or from the voices in his head.

So you find Aradia again.

She sees you and her breath seems to catch for a moment and you have to wonder if this is how your mother felt upon finding Aradia’s mother. If this is how Melanie felt upon finding (Meenah felt upon finding) Damara (She has no other name, not anymore.)

You extend a hand to her and smile when she takes it. “Felicity, this time.”

“Amanda,” her smile is wild and free and untamed and goddesses, but you just want to capture it in a bottle, put it onto a canvas, write a book about it. She is beautiful and free and wild. That is just _how she is._ “Good to see you, Feferi.” She says it carefully and you love her just a little more for it.

“Good to see you too, Aradia.”

 

You have never wanted sex.

Intimacy, certainly. A held hand, the soft kisses shared between those who are deeply in love, the moments shared between those whose lives are intertwined. You suppose that was the problem with being a troll.

The society you’d once existed in had not had a word for Asexual.

Everything had been laced with it, with the expectation that you would one day do things like that. You had never wanted, had never been pleased with the thought. It had always sort of terrified you, sickened you, and knowing that it was expected with Eridan, with anyone whose quadrants you had become part of…

No.

It was just not a part of who you were, not a part of who you wanted to be. It was not meant for you and the expectation had nearly broken you. It had been a driving force behind you and Eridan falling apart at times, because you had pulled away from him when you realized what was to come.

It was not him, not entirely.

Sollux had understood. He had been with Aradia, he had explained quietly. Aradia, beautiful and wild and free and never once interested in doing anything of the sort. Aradia, whose interests had always been in looking into the ruins and the past, never once in the expectations of a troll in a society that demanded.

You had been almost breathless at the thought of someone who knew what you were like. Someone else like you. If there was more than one person, whose bloodline was different than your own, then you were not broken. Sollux had simply offered himself as a source of hugs and comfort, a softness in a world of hard edges and expectations of a young royal.

He had never pressed, had always kept himself respectable and never pushed at you.

Eridan had pushed a little.

And it was never just him. Your anger and frustration had blamed him, he had blamed you, things had gone wrong and you had regretted that. You were an ill-matched pair.

 

Humans have a word for you.

Several words, actually, covering a spectrum of various types of a similar thing. Asexual and Aromantic and Agender and it makes a part of you want to cry happy tears until there is nothing left to cry.

Your name is Felicity Maxwell and you are Asexual and finally able to say something about it without a demanding regime breathing down your neck. Amanda and you are able to talk about it with each other, talk about how scared and isolated you had felt back when you were trolls. She tells you she is glad that Sollux had been able to help you as well.

She is good and kind and sweet and you love her for it.

You love the sunshine in her smile and the way she hums when she’s cooking and how her feet move when she’s cleaning up something. She dances at every moment possible. Amanda will stare at you and you will watch her and she will laugh and you will laugh and she will dance. Her feet move to a rhythm only she can hear and she will drop down to sit next to you – her shoulder is hot against yours and it is comforting and cozy and everything you have ever wanted.

All you have ever wanted is someone to hold on to.

Someone who wanted to hold you, too, without expectation of anything else. Without the expectation of sex tied to every movement, every second you spent breathing. Hold and be held, all you ever wanted. Someone to talk to, someone to listen to.

And Amanda, when you tell her, nods quickly and smiles her sunshine-warm smile. “Of course,” she says.

Of course.

Like it is so easy, as if she never expected anything different.

 

Your name is Felicity Maxwell and you are twenty-eight when it is _finally_ over.

Lord English is dead, Caliborn is dead, Calliope is the sole inheritor of her father’s fortunes. The legal ones, at any rate. The crews he had working for him will still keep in good contact with her and you do worry about that a bit, but it pales in comparison to the knowledge that Amanda and Damara and their mother will never be in danger again.

When the battle is over and you can finally go home, you turn to Amanda and pull her into your arms, lifting her off the ground and spinning until you’re dizzy.

When she kisses you, it feels right.

Intimate and safe and just – a little – heated. Like she wants to keep kissing you until the world ends. There is still no expectation behind it, her hands planted firmly on the sides of your head. This is all she wants, all you want, and the two of you are operating on the same wavelength as far as it goes.

You can hear someone whistling, loud and approving, and Amanda laughs into your mouth, smiling against your lips.

Your name is Felicity Maxwell, you used to be Feferi Peixes, and you are in love.

The world is safe and you are in love and your family is happy.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy endings, y'all. Hope you enjoyed this series.
> 
> We've finally come to a close.


End file.
